Announcements

‘Sharing expertise about our
agricultural past is one of the primary aims of the AIMA. Making Tools &
Tillage available online represents a significant step towards realising this
goal. With the support and generosity of the University Library Heidelberg,
decades of fascinating scholarly work have now been made freely available to
researchers worldwide. The AIMA community hopes that this represents a new
phase in the sharing of knowledge and heralds the beginning of many fresh
collaborations between the partner organisations involved.’ — Dr Ollie Douglas, President of the International Association of
Agricultural Museums

The
international journal Tools & Tillage
is a great resource about historic farming techniques and traditional
agricultural practices, combined with an (experimental) archaeological
approach. Published over the years 1968-1995 it pulled together an impressive
number of research projects from around the world, a remarkable effort in the
days without internet.

As the
number of people studying rural history increases, and museums continue to
interpret meaning and method, several of us who work with agricultural museums,
experimental archaeology, living history farms, and open-air museums decided to
join forces to try and make Tools &
Tillage more widely available.

As debates
about environmental change gain intensity, and as agricultural practices factor
significantly in these debates, the research published in Tools & Tillage seems more and more essential to our collective
understanding. Yet, the journal is very hard to
access. Three international organisations collaborated to increase
access with the aim of engaging younger historians of
rural and farm life with the essential knowledge and skills of agricultural
techniques published over 27 years in Tools & Tillage.

We found an avid
supporter in Dr. Grith Lerche, the only remaining editor of Tools & Tillage, and owner of the
copyrights. She co-edited Tools &
Tillage with Axel Steensberg and Alexander Fenton. Thanks to
UNESCO-Welterbestätte Kloster Lorsch – Experimentalarchäologisches
Freilichtlabor Lauresham (DE), the University Library of Heidelberg (DE) scanned
the material and made it available, including a full text search of the 137
articles in 1,776 pages.

The full Journal is
made available for dissemination and preservation of the electronic files under
a (CC BY 4.0) license at: